


Save You

by bellyuppo



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Angst, Depressed Stiles, Hurt/Comfort, Kid Deaton, Kid Hales, Kid Peter Hale, M/M, Magic trees & magic, OOC, Original Character(s), POV Stiles, Shorts, Sort Of, Temporary Character Death, Tribunal - Freeform, baby werewolves & druids
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-18
Updated: 2018-01-26
Packaged: 2019-03-06 08:20:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13407228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellyuppo/pseuds/bellyuppo
Summary: Snippets of a time-traveling Stiles and his labors to right the world of wrongs.Please beware the perils of missing sense and coherency.





	1. The prelude, part 1

**Author's Note:**

> Main pairing will be slash and minor, if any? TBD.  
> Snippets are short and discontinuous but chronological.  
> First several chapters are far from lighthearted (depression and suicidal trigger warnings). Return to the previous page if you foresee this as a source of distress, please.

“Fuck you, you overgrown Ferris wheel-” is what he means to say, though what comes out is more _fuggyu yo-ou ov’gone fesswil-_ on account of being more than a little tipsy.

He stumbles over his toes as he’s shoved out, losing his footing and almost planting a solid on the stubbly lips of the concrete floor and cracking a few of his teeth while he’s at it.

He doesn’t though, and hops on his heel to cartwheel into one sharp corner of the building opposite the pub entrance – or _exit,_ in his case – smacking into it before rebounding and plopping onto his poor rear, right at the mouth of the alley.

Little birdies chirp merrily in an invisible halo over his aching head.

“Eh, fuck you too,” he spits when the sky stops spinning, glowering drunkenly at his brick-laden adversary.

The wheel of a skidding bike nearly amputates his left foot and he scrabbles further back into the darkness of the alley. It’s cold and wet. He honks a snort before toppling onto his back.

Something smells like a market-full of perishables gone bad. He’s about twenty-four percent certain that that something isn’t him, but he’s alone, and it’s January, and no one is willing to forsake their hurry home – where it’s warm and cozy and _warm_ – to nag at an old turnip like him about personal hygiene.

( _Home._ It’s a word he hasn’t had cause to use in a long while.)

( _Alone,_ but he doesn’t think about that, not if he wants to wake up again tomorrow.)

He sinks himself deeper into the bitter gravel beneath his ass and resolutely tells himself that it’s not a metaphor.

His eyes are dry. In this weather, tears would freeze over into ice anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Best be with you.


	2. The prelude, part 2

He gets up when he can’t feel the tip of his nose.

He sniffles, and the wind catches on the string of snot, sending a sweep of frosty chill straight up his nostril and making him shiver.

The skies are as bleak as his sinuses – cloudy too – and he wonders not for the first time what he’s still doing here.

Their ghosts haunt him. Their whispers stalk him. But when he turns around all that greets him is a wreckage of corpses and their _screams._

He’s crumbling on the edge of his grief with no one to keep him sane, but he goes through the motions because he has to, climbs to his feet and trudges down the street to his next set of bottles because he has to, because say those what may about Stiles, but he will not stomp over the sacrifices – the _mistakes –_ made in his name just to keep him alive and kicking.

His dad worries. He can tell.

Stiles dares him to protest after what he’d done when Mom, and later Melissa, died. Funnily enough, his father never quite scoops up that gauntlet, and Stiles has long given up trying to decide if he’s more appeased or hateful about that.

But none of that matters. _None of it matters._ It’s all a farce – a _beacon –_ to distract from the fact that he’s only got one foot on the ledge and he’s just waiting for the nudge to finally push him over.

He’s deluding himself if he thinks that last plunge won’t be the sweetest freefall he’ll never get to take.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Best be with you.


	3. The prelude, part 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last of the prelude.

The Nemeton is dead – dying.

Stiles remembers when he first saw it, years ago, how it could hardly be called a tree, hacked down as it was to a low stump while only the thickness of its trunk told the tale of how _magnificent_ it used to be.

There isn’t even that now, charred black, with flakes of sooty splinters swaying with each whistle of the winter gale like a dead limb. There’s a ring of discolored grass around it, patches of dull yellow – killed by the cold of the season – but most of it tinted by streaks of umber. Its age lines are hard to discern under all the burnt bits. Its roots are knotted in ash, curling in on themselves, breaching the dirt floor and completing the frozen skeleton of a tableau inked with the remnants of his damnation.

Compared to that – ragged mess of brittle wood chips and cracked _everything –_ the stump that it used to be looks like Jack’s Magic Beanstalk about a hundred times over.

Stiles stares into the remains of the Nemeton. He’s currently sitting on a rock, a pad of leaves between it and the seat of his jeans to ward off the chill seeping up through the flat surface.

It’s quiet here, if nippy. But he prefers that to the rustle and bustle of other people, and the trees of the clearing block out enough wind to keep the tips of his ears from frostbite.

A phantom breeze of warmth and affection ruffles his heart as he recalls a time when he didn’t mind the company as much.

The thought sours as it is replaced by more recent memories, bitter and vile, and Stiles wheezes a cough to clear his throat of the cloud of fumes that’s not there.

He thinks of a blue-eyed wolf, as he always does in these moments, one who had lost nearly everything and everyone he cared about at the hands of ignorance, and wonders what he would think of Stiles now, wonders what he would think of how he’s barely even living, weighed down by the ghosts of his past – waiting for the day to join them – when _he_ didn’t waste one _minute_ to get off his ass, start extracting his revenge, and fucking _ **do something.**_

He can picture the disgusted scowl like it was yesterday.

Peter never had to deal with a supernatural institution whose mundane equivalent was the U.S. White House, Pentagon and Supreme Court all rolled into one devastating package though, and Stiles hangs onto that like it’s his only – which, in a way, it _is –_ lifeline.

That’s only the beginning. Stiles wallows in his memories, letting them simmer as he drowns in a looping cycle of his greatest regrets.

Abruptly, the memory of his fifth birthday blooms to the forefront, incongruent with everything as he gleefully bowls into a giggling and miniature Scott on legs too long for his body, surrounded by grass, flowers, and sunshine, and both their mothers smiling indulgently across a demolished cake and a picnic basket a few feet away from them.

It’s one of his happiest memories, and he swats it away with a growl as he seethes at the Nemeton, beyond furious that it’s being turned into a weapon to use against him.

“You better apologize,” he whispers through gritted teeth.

A wisp of a presence skates solemnly across the edge of his mind, making him shudder.

 _Jesus-fuck, but I’ll never get used to that,_ he swears internally.

It feels properly penitent enough, skirting against the mental boundaries of their link and poking it without actually crossing over, so he lets it go.

They’re a bit codependent these days, the reason being that they’re each all the other really has left from a time that used to be better – lighter and _happier –_ and they’re both a lot too broken to argue against the comfort of something familiar. However brief, they were each other’s support, once upon a time: Stiles, who acted as a conduit to removing a dark spirit whose entrapment had in turn caged and tainted the Nemeton’s own magic; and the Nemeton, which played the centerpiece to the ritual that killed Stiles, resurrected him, and saved his father.

Stiles is still bitter that Dad had needed saving in the first place, but he can hardly blame the tree.

(Jennifer had gotten what was coming to her; Stiles may not have been the one to do it, but in the end that’s what mattered.)

The bond, well, that’s something new.

Stiles mentally slaps at the digits that prod inquisitively at a memory of him jerking off to gay porn, thinking back to the night he’d woken up to find some…thing tugging at the back of his mind, yanking him in the direction of the forest and toward a place he’d known was there but long forgotten about.

He’d had no reason not to, his sense of self-preservation was already in tatters, and so he’d stumbled in the dark to wrestle on a jacket over his pajamas and a pair of socks over his bare toes before kicking his car into ignition and making a drive he couldn’t remember purely by the impatient tugging at the back of his brain.

He really should have known better.

He started heaving the second he saw the tree, nightmares of the fire, the poison, and the agonized pleas of his friends making his vision swim. By the time he could see again, his face was sheet-pale, his palms clammy, as he quivered on his knees in a pool of his own vomit.

He ran, hightailing it into his car then a good dozen cans of beer just to tamp down his sobs.

He ignored the pathetic scrabbling from the other side of the bond for three weeks. He erected a fence between them, and it would scratch at it, begging for scraps from a man who had nothing in him left to give. It whined and shrieked and howled for him to come back, squeezing snapshots of despair and distress through the gaps of the barrier, while Stiles ignored it all.

That went on until the tree began to press images of his friends – of Kira’s best puppy-dog eyes and Malia’s _I-want-something-but-I-can’t-words-so-I’ll-aggressively-squint-at-you-until-you-give-me-it_ face _–_ at which point he threw down the fence, yanked the damned thing over the threshold, and laid down some ground rules.

Nowadays, the Nemeton stays away from the corner of his mind labeled with the bold **DO NOT TOUCH** taped behind ropes of hot iron chains, and Stiles lets it sift through the rest of it.

And he visits often. (Like now.)

Recently however, the presence in his mind has become increasingly restless, kneading one nonexistent cheek into Stiles’ nonexistent hand like a feline, and noticeably twitching toward that sectioned-off corner of his mind in turns. Sometimes it just _looks_ at it – psychically speaking – like it’s considering how to rip through the chains and to hell with the consequences.

It scares Stiles, not only because of what’s waiting behind that corner, but also because he’s always known the Nemeton wants something from him. He doesn’t know _what_ exactly, and before now the tree’s been too wary of upsetting him again to ask. He’s afraid of what it’ll mean for him when it finally makes its move, and probably decides it wants to drag Stiles kicking and hollering up a storm right alongside its path.

Every time he thinks like that though, the Nemeton hastily scuttles a retreat, sending soothing lullabies of what feels like safety, wistfulness, and _hope_ down the bond like that’ll break him.

Stiles will never admit that it does, and the next time the Nemeton leans against the chains of his mind, a question brimming over the subtle hum of its consciousness, he does something he’s only ever done once before.

Stiles accepts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me know what you think.


	4. Interlude

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Suicidal thoughts TW.  
> Brief bridge spanning the years since the deaths of Stiles' friends until the first of the prelude. Main story begins the next chapter _yayfinally!_

_He blinks to find a small hoard of pharmaceuticals in the cup of his palm._

_He stops, breathes, and scatters them in the closest dumpster._

_He dozes, and startles awake at the precipice of a hundred-foot building._

_He stops, breathes, turns away._

_Water overflows from the lip of the tub._

_Stop. Breathe. Reach for the cork._

_His shirt tangles around his clavicle._

_Stop. Breathe. Unravel._

_Pokes at a match._

_Stop. Breathe. Hose it down._

_Picks up the razor._

_Stop. Breathe. Hide it._

_Fingers the trigger._

_Stop. Breathe._

_._

_._

_._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Depression is no joke. If you experience any of the symptoms, please visit a therapist, counselor, or psychiatrist. Call a free hotline. Confide in a family member or a close friend. But for the sake of everything you have, do and promise to enjoy in life, please, _please,_ don't suffer it alone. I guarantee that more than one person out there is willing to listen to you, blame-free and no judgment.


End file.
